Brian Tashman's blog

Last week on “Washington Watch,” Rick Santorum spoke to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins about an anti-choice group’s deceptivelyedited video targeting Planned Parenthood, arguing that the reproductive health organization has been corrupt from the get-go.

“The person who started Planned Parenthood was a racist, was a segregationist, was a eugenicist, and they have not strayed far at all from their original idea, which is to deconstruct humanity,” Santorum said.

Santorum also suggested that President Obama is hypocritical for supporting Planned Parenthood: “To see a president who talks about civil rights and talks about discrimination and to see him align himself with an organization with this history, and now this present abuse, illegal criminal activity, for him not to step forward and prosecute this fully just shows you that it’s not a moral issue, it’s simply a power and political issue, and that’s what’s driving the current Democratic Party and this president.”

While Santorum is correct that Sanger was a supporter of the eugenics movement, as PolitiFact noted, the movement “had been widely accepted” at the time among political leaders including Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover: “In other words, supporting eugenics did not automatically equal racism.” Biographers have also found that Sanger strongly opposed racial segregation. Instead, her critics have relied on a single quote that they have badlydistorted.

Republican presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson are slated to speak later this month at an “All Lives Matter” summit, which is trying to use the language of Black Lives Matter protesters to denounce abortion rights. The conference is sponsored by the Freedom’s Journal Institute and the World Congress of Families, a far-right organization that has faced scrutiny for its role in pushing extreme anti-LGBT laws in Russia and around the world.

One conference organizer, Eric Wallace, a black conservative activist whobriefly ran for U.S. Senate in 2010, said in a statement that Black Lives Matter activists are ignoring “the thousands of Black babies killed every day” and “Black on Black crime”:

Current events have called into question (by some) whether Black lives matter. Does Black Life really matter? That is not a new question, Black pro-life groups and others have been asking this question ever since Roe vs Wade. But, where are the cries for the thousands of Black babies killed every day? Where is the outrage for the hundreds of young black males being incarcerated? Or the disgrace concerning Black on Black crime? Where are the voices calling for school choice in public education? And where are those who are truly concerned about issues such as economic empowerment?

Under the banner of defending “the family,” the World Congress of Families supported a Russian ban on speech considered to be pro-LGBT “propaganda” as it helped right-wing activists to build up a Religious Right infrastructure in the country. One group spokesman hailed Russian leaders as “the Christian saviors of the world” for “preventing [gays] from corrupting children.”

It is rather fitting that Huckabee and Carson, two candidates who regularly claim that Americans, and conservatives in particular, are losing their freedom of speech, are aligning with a group that supports the criminalization of free speech on LGBT issues.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has been facing a firestorm after he refused to say this weekend whether he thinks people choose to be gay. Walker told CNN’s Dana Bash that he didn’t “know the answer to that question,” all the while boasting in the same interview that “people find [it] unique” that “I actually answer questions. People ask me a question, I’ll answer a question.”

Walker’s (non)comments on homosexuality come after the Republican presidential candidate said that he supported the Boy Scouts of America’s current ban on gay scoutmasters “because it protected children and advanced Scout values.”

Incomprehensibly, a campaign spokesman later said that Walker was only saying that “the previous policy protected Scouts from the rancorous political debate over policy issues and culture war.”

But snubbing direct questions and finding ways to take contradicting stances on basic policy issues has been the way Walker has been campaigning from the beginning.

1) ‘Punt’ on Evolution

Walker raised eyebrows earlier this year when he refused to answer a straightforward question on whether he believes in the theory of evolution, explaining: “I’m going to punt on that one as well. That’s a question a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or the other. So I’m going to leave that up to you.”

When asked about it again days later, Walker stood by his refusal to answer the question, simply saying that he thinks “science and my faith aren’t incompatible.”

2) ‘I Don’t Know’ If Obama Is A Christian

Following his “punt” on evolution, Walker fielded a question from the Washington Post on whether he believes that President Obama is a Christian. “I don’t know,” Walker replied, a stance he continued to take even after he was “told that Obama has frequently spoken publicly about his Christian faith,” explaining: “I’ve never asked him that.”

A spokesman later told the Post that Walker does believe Obama is a Christian, he just didn’t want to answer “gotcha questions.”

3) ‘I Don’t Know’ If Obama Loves America

At the very same event where Walker refused to say whether he believes Obama is a Christian, the Wisconsin governor also declined to answer a question about whether Obama loves America.

Walker, who attended the dinner at which Rudy Giuliani claimed that Obama doesn’t love his country, told reporters: “You should ask the president what he thinks about America. I’ve never asked him so I don’t know.”

“There’s not a flip out there,” Walker said. “A flip would be someone who voted on something and did something different. I don’t have any impact on immigration as a governor or former county official.”

Since he didn’t vote on anything because he was an executive official, Walker said, it doesn’t count, no matter what he has said in the past.

5) Misleading on Abortion Rights

During his race for re-election, Walker defended anti-choice legislation he signed by insisting in a TV ad that “the bill leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor.”

Such remarks weren’t received well by anti-choice activists, who agreed with Walker’s pro-choice detractors that the governor was trying to make it seem like he was protecting reproductive rights and keeping abortion “safe” for women.

Now as a presidential candidate, Walker has been catering to anti-choice leaders, reportedly telling them that, as one paraphrased, he was “using the language of the other side” to promote his anti-abortion views.

When Laura Ingraham, a right-wing radio host, asked him last week, “You don’t believe the final decision should be between a woman and her doctor?,” Walker said, “No.”

At least he finally answered that question in a straightforward way. It’s too bad that he rarely gives such clear answers to voters.

“You wonder if he actually knows the history of Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger, who was trying to eliminate black people,” he said. “That was the whole purpose of it.”

His allegation rests on a debunked claim that has circulated through right-wing circles for years that Sanger was using birth control to exterminate the African American community.

Carson also promised that he would use Hillary Clinton’s praise for Sanger and her relationship with Saul Alinsky against her in the presidential race, claiming that he would “educate the people” that the campaign is really about a divide between “American and anti-American things.” This led him to attack the Affordable Care Act, which he said was illegitimately “shoved down our throat” … even though it became a law just as any other law does through an act of Congress.

The GOP candidate later returned to the Planned Parenthood video.

“If we can’t defund Planned Parenthood after this, we’re lost, we’re just in the wilderness forever,” he said. “This is the smoking gun. We’ve always known the kind of organization this and how anti-life they are.”

He also claimed that the video will help him make the case that abortion should be banned: “We can also use this then to help women understand that they are being manipulated. They’re being told, ‘if you can’t kill your baby then somebody is against you,’ when in fact the woman is the protector of that baby, this is one of the sacred relationships of humanity.”

During an appearance on “The Jan Mickelson Show” last week, Cruz insisted that “the Democrats support illegal immigration,” which led him to praise Trump for his remarks describing immigrants as rapists.

“It’s one of the reasons why I’ve been so vocal in the past couple of weeks defending Donald Trump because you’ve had a whole slew of 2016 Republican candidates running out of their way to smack Donald Trump with a stick, and not only am I not going to do that but I’ve been singing his praises,” Cruz said, before adding: “He is absolutely right.”

Huckabee said that the U.S. government should simply refuse to recognize the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality, insisting that gay marriage can only be legal nationwide if Congress passes a law making it so.

Instead, Huckabee pledged to aggressively “defend religious liberty and the rights of people of faith and conscience whether they’re business owners acting as individuals, whether they’re hospitals, churches, schools, adoption agencies” so that “no one’s religious liberty will be trampled upon because they refuse to bow to something that violates nature and nature’s God. Words, that by the way, I borrowed right out of the Declaration of Independence”

Brody: I want to ask you another question about gay marriage and religious liberty. They go hand in hand. Now President Mike Huckabee, what would that 100 days look like under a President Mike Huckabee administration as it relates to gay marriage because a lot of people say ‘Hey, the train’s leaving the station. Oh well. Good luck to you in the future.' What’s a President Huckabee do?

Huckabee: When people say the train left the station, it’s the law of the land, there’s nothing we can do, let’s move on. I want to say, ‘Have you guys read the Constitution, did you pass 9th grade civics?' The court can’t make law. We pretend that it can and I’m convinced that a lot of people give that sort of response because they don’t want to have to deal with the complexities of the constitution, which says that there are checks and balances. If we surrender to the judicial branch as if it is the last, final and ultimate word, then we have surrendered to judicial tyranny which is what Jefferson warned us about and the reason that he rejected some Supreme Court arguments as simply being something he couldn’t accept and he didn’t…as did Jackson, as did Lincoln. This notion that the Supreme Court ruled it and therefore it’s the law of the land bypasses the only entity in our government that can make the law of the land: the legislative branch, and it’s not even law until the president signs it and agrees to enforce it. And first of all, a president, if he's not going to uphold that part of the constitution, get out of the race because you’re going to be lying when you take the oath and say you’ll uphold and defend the constitution because on its face, you’re not defending it, neither are you upholding it when you surrender to the god of judicial supremacy so we’ve got to start there and I certainly would start there.

Brody: Can you do something as it relates to some executive orders, are there certain things you can do?

Huckabee: Absolutely. You can reverse the executive orders as it relates to how the president has said you’re going to make this a mandatory issue throughout federal government but you also instruct the attorney general to defend religious liberty and the rights of people of faith and conscience whether they’re business owners acting as individuals, whether they’re hospitals, churches, schools, adoption agencies. It doesn’t matter what it is. That no one’s religious liberty will be trampled upon because they refuse to bow to something that violates nature and nature’s God. Words, that by the way, I borrowed right out of the Declaration of Independence. But I’d also order the Secretary of Defense on Day One that you will empower chaplains to perform their religious duties according to their conscience and you will further make sure that no military member is prohibited from the free exercise of their religious faith so long as it does not impose itself as a hazard to their duty or an imposition to their fellow military members, which means if the chaplain wants to put a Bible on his desk, do it. If the chaplain wants to pray in Jesus’ name or the name of Allah, he does it. If the chaplain wants to counsel according to his conscience and to what he believes about sexual behavior, then he’s free to do it. Otherwise you have told him what the limitations of his belief can be and unless those limitations somehow impede that soldier’s ability to be a soldier, or a sailor, or a marine, or an airman, or a coast guardsman, then it is not the purview of the government of the United States to prohibit the free exercise thereof of his or her religion.

As LGBT people in the United States win important fights in courts and legislatures, American anti-gay activists are increasingly turning their attentions abroad, where their dangerous ideology is causing serious—even deadly—harm. This panel will examine the role of the U.S. right-wing movement in organizing and funding homophobia abroad, as well as the role progressive activists have in holding global anti-gay activists accountable at home.

It’s been over two weeks since former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay announced that he has uncovered a “secret memo” from the Justice Department stating that bestiality and pedophilia will soon be made legal.

Castellitto writes today that this “secret memo” that no one has seen (except for DeLay, of course) shows that Satan has now taken over the U.S. as the country has become “a spiritual cesspool.”

“I’m sorry to say this, but it’s over,” he writes. “Satan has control.”

Our eyes are wide shut…

But Satan likes it that way. He’s a liar from the beginning.

He will insist that all things are permissible (even taking a life). He will tell you there is nothing on the other side. He will tell you that you can be your own god.

…

Ultimately, he will enable you to be sexually ensnared and enslaved in a web of perverse bondage and spiritual peril. You will be a slave to Satan and his minions. You will be left empty, broken and destitute. This is where we are…

“We’ve … found a secret memo coming out of the Justice Department. They’re now going to go after 12 new perversions. Things like bestiality, polygamy, having sex with little boys and making that legal” ~ Former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay